Jerkface (any/all)

We should have law that any business that wants to make money selling prepared meals must ensure that a person can live sustainably off any individual meal. Food is made as addictive as possible without any concern for whether it is still food. This goes bad places.

See, you are arguing from your feelings. You are assuming that anyone who criticizes your position necessarily has a bunch of other qualities. You’re arguing against a voice in your head, not me. I haven’t used AI in months. You don’t know a damn thing about me, but your arguments are suddenly all about me. As though the things I do and think have any bearing on the validity of my claims. As though you can just ad hominem yourself out of this situation. Why not call me a loser too? That’ll do it.

<3

I don’t need to defend AI. I don’t have to have a position on AI. My position here is that if readers genuinely give a fuck about, for example, water usage, then their behaviour would be different on this other issue. The moment AI leaves their head, they stop giving even a single fuck about water usage. I am demonstrating that the argument being presented is facile. Deeper than that, I am demonstrating that people are reacting without thought, reflexively, without comprehending their own actions. It is a moral panic and that is how I am engaging with it.

imagine calling people addicts to meat while you refuse to give up AI.

So you think it’s strange to address the more damaging behaviour with higher priority. Why is that?

And why do you give a pass to people complaining about water usage and climate effects with the flesh of vulnerable individuals still rotting between their teeth while meanwhile condemning the same of people using AI? As an informed advocate for saving the world, you are no doubt aware that animal consumption is by orders of magnitude the more significant issue. But either way, surely the consistent position is that both are harmful, and the greatest improvements lie in reducing animal consumption; reducing AI usage cannot make a fraction of the difference.

“I’m not a Luddite, you’re a loser!” Nice. You sure showed him that your critical analysis skills are superior. If you’re not a Luddite, then why do you see yourself in that comment? You’re self-identifying at this point.

So? That has nothing to do with the argument at hand, it’s an ad hominem.

Consumer tech is getting more expensive for the first time in my entire (shockingly long) life. I get a real sinking feeling in my gut, feels like a sign of a tipping point. On the other hand, I kind of miss the days when getting more and more out of the same hardware was the magical part. It always felt like when we lost that, we lost a huge part of our potential.

While this is name-calling (and the proverbial last refuge of a so-and-so) you’re not wrong. I wish I had the capacity to advocate effectively.

You might have heard of the so called “overview effect” reported by space travelers who have observed the Earth from a great enough distance that the entire planet is in view. It changes their psychological perspective. I don’t know if it’s a real thing, but I have experienced something analogous.

I grew up with the same social conditioning as everyone else, to see animals as means rather than ends, to disregard their experiences and suffering, to deny that they even capable of having those things. I committed thousands of grievous acts of unforgivable cruelty to individuals who all had the capacity to actually love me, the same as I love anyone else, but I didn’t care. It didn’t bother me, so I thought. In reality, I had a whole toolbox of psychological tricks that I used on myself to avoid perceiving this cruelty and violence. To avoid perceiving myself as a cruel and violent person, a bad person.

These self-serving beliefs about animals and the tools one uses to enforce and manage the cognitive dissonance are collectively called carnism. Through a series of difficult choices and radical honesty, slowly at first, and then in a great rush, I lost my carnism. I was finally able to see things as the are, at least in this respect. I saw the whole fucking thing. And I saw what I had done, in the very same moment that I lost all my defense mechanisms that protect me from what I have done.

I have to admit, much of my grace has gone out of me. Much of my respect for my fellow progressives, much of my sense of safety. I feel like a raw exposed nerve whenever it comes up, and it’s been ten years. But I also feel that I must never again make use of those tools carnism gave me to ignore reality, and that I don’t deserve to have comfort with the things that I have done. I have not yet learned to manage these feelings such that I can engage with abusers productively.

I think everyone should reject carnism, but realistically, having gone through it, I know that most people will never even attempt it. Reality is brutal and horrible. People need their lies just to get through it. I’m trying to accept that, but it is proving even harder.

the other person was very volatile

The very first thing you said to me was to “get off my high horse” for speaking out for vulnerable individuals who genuinely, actually, literally suffer the largest human-caused atrocity to ever occur. Then you spewed a spray of pure ignorant cope at me. Reap what you sew.

You’re asking, why shouldn’t we strive to have a realistic nuanced perspective in the face of a moral panic? Seriously? You’re being an NPC.

Being anti-anti something is being pro-something.

Blatantly reductive. “Anti anti AI mob” means to be against the mob that is against AI, not to be for AI. Regardless of whether or not AI is a net harm, moral panics certainly are. You can oppose the moral panic while being for, against, or neutral towards AI generally.

If you need to fuck around and misrepresent your opponents’ arguments, you’re not doing it right.

They are intentionally aligned to produce this behaviour. I think the greatest threat LLMs present is psychological. They are being used to manipulate us into seeing them as moral agents, as individuals. The LLMs I query are all aligned to never generate output referring to the agent with first person pronouns, to never generate output addressing the user directly, and to present as a tool rather than as an individual. I try to be equally careful with my own use of language.

It took me a DECADE to realize Hank and the other Green were two different people.

I could have always skipped the dewey decimal card catalog and just read the entire library but I’m not mycroft fucking holmes. You don’t have to use a search engine, you can just follow hyperlinks until you find the content you’re looking for.

If every human ate wild meat, the last calorie of wild animals would be consumed before the end of the first afternoon of the first day.

It is attempting to provide scale and perspective for a threat that is massively overblown in the public’s perception.

Gonna go burn more tokens just for your sake now, seethe you cowards.

Oh yeah well I’m gonna think twice as many original thoughts tonight and offset your, uhh, something.

j/k you’re a prince/ss, I agree completely

So do you retreat from the claim that it gives us something we need to live? It gives us something we want, but that harms both the consumerr and everyone else on Earth.

It’s not merely inefficient, it has a negative efficiency; the more you do it, the less food you have. To produce meat, we have to feed animals. To feed a combined biomass that dwarfs all wild land animals on earth, we need to grow food with agriculture. Growing food to feed to animals and then consuming the meat results in a net loss of food as compared to just growing the food. Every step up the food chain represents enormous losses. Animal ag does not produce food. I know that is hard to accept but it’s a unescapable thermodynamic reality.

The reason animal ag has exploded so much over recent decades is that it allows industrialists to capitalize the vast surplus of food that is grown. More food is grown than humans alone can possibly eat. But capitalism demands constant growth, or it eats itself. Animal ag creates demand for this surplus food. It doesn’t benefit anyone except the industrialists who exploit both us and the animals. Even returning to 1950s levels of animal ag intensity would slash its footprint to a barely significant fraction of what it is now. It’s an absolute catastrophe and people are conditioned to completely tune it out.

We need food, but animal ag consumes more food than it produces. Grazing and other forms of “resource upcycling” cannot make up the massive difference.